Paper Making Round 5

Posted by Fallon Foster on July 30, 2014

This is one of those cases where a little modern technology makes a dramatic difference. One cheap blender later the paper's coming out much more uniform. It's coming along much faster now too, so fast that I tried two types of pulp this week. The lower batch of pages was made with printer paper and the upper batch was made with junkmail. I'm probably more amused than I should be that the junkmail is essentially cardboard. I'm imagining it'll be handy as book binding and structural stuff and I'm fairly happy with it as is. The recycled printer paper could stand to be a bit more even, and even a bit thinner. I tore a chunk off one sheet just to see how the grain's aligned and it's less random than I'd suspected. This leads me to conclude that the fibers tend to naturally line up along a grain, probably due to some feature of their structure. Of course, I don't have any way to test that hypothesis objectively (yet), but it's an intriguing notion. At this rate I expect to be hitting upon a product-worthy process in 2 or 3 more rounds.